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The Unnoticed Continuity

The prehistory of the Hungarian refugee interview project
We should go back at least to June 13, 1942 to see the political,
ideological, historical and historiographical significance of the massive,
unparalleled 1956 Hungarian refugee interview-project in proper
perspective. On that day President Roosevelt's Executive Order created
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a federal organization in charge
of coordinated intelligence to respond to the needs of the United
States under the condition of World War II.
Not long after it had been established, OSS organized a Research and
Analysis (R&A) Branch and started recruiting young and senior
scholars, mostly from the humanities and the social sciences, to make
use of their intellectual and professional skills in the service of the U.S.
war efforts. Seven future presidents of the American Historical
Association, future presidents of the American Economical Association,
and future Nobel Laureate, Wassily Leontieff, together with prominent,
mostly left-wing emigrant European academics worked for OSS during
the war. In less than a year, more than nine hundred scholars would
work for the R&A Branch.
The R&A Europe-Africa Divisions Central European Section hired not
only bright American academics but also exiled scholars, freshly
arrived from Hitler's Germany and Austria. Quite a few of them had a
Marxist background, most of them belonged to the intellectual left,
they were the first serious experts of Nazi Germany, and the early
proponents of totalitarian theory. Some had been originally affiliated
with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, and its successor

institute, the International Institute for Social Research. Max

Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, the
historian Otto Kirschheimer, the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, Arkadij
Gurland, the film theoretician Siegfried Kracauer, all were associated
with OSS. Richard Krautheimer, the historian, Paul Baran who left the
the Plekhanov Insitute of Economics in 1928, together with Paul
Sweezy, founding editors of the radical left-wing Monthly Review, and
Eugene Fodor (of the Fodor guidebooks series) were employed too.1
The Central European Section was responsible primarily for analyzing
and interpreting the developments in Germany, but it was also in
charge of Central Europe at large. (This is why Paul Zinner worked on
Czechoslovakia he would have a role to play in the Hungarian
Refugee Interview project in 1956 and Leslie Tihany, together with
Robert von Neumann, John von Neumanns brother, worked on
Hungary.) OSS set up an USSR Division as well, led by Geroid T.
Robinson, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, New
York, the future head of the first Russian and Soviet area-studies
program at the U.S. Post-World War II area studies, one of the most
important academic innovations of the 1950s and 1960s grow out of
the activities of OSS; most of the early leaders and personnel of the
programs had been affiliated with the Office of Strategic Services. The
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations that provided the financial backing
for the area-studies programs had close connections to the U.S.
government and the intelligence community, whose needs shaped the
curricula and initial professional directions of the area-studies

The section on the role of academics in general and especially emigre intellectuals at OSS is
indebted to Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence. Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services
1942-1945. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1989. A chapter of the book was published as The
Criticism of Arms: The Frankfurt School goes to War. In: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 59. No.3.
September, 1987 pp. 439-478.

programs. In 1956 Henry L. Roberts, head of the Russian Institute

became the leader of the Hungarian interview project at Columbia.
The story of the Hungarian refugee interviews starts even before the
summer of 1942. The scholars at the Institut fr Socialforschung, had
already had some important ideas about the working of Fascism, and
the nature of totalitarianism. Our views on Nazi Germany despite the
enormous quantity of documents consulted and work published after
World War II is still heavily influenced by those early ideas about the
nature of totalitarianism. As Herbert Marcuse formulated it later on: If
there was one matter about which the author and his friends were
not uncertain, it was that the fascist state was a fascist society, and
that totalitarian violence and totalitarian reason came from the
structure of existing society....
The theoretical work of the prewar years, especially early notions of
totalitarian theory highly influenced the way how the scholars, working
at OSS, perceived both National Socialist Germany and the future task
of the occupational forces in post-war Germany. One of the most
important intellectual influences for the scholars working at OSS was
Franz Neumanns study, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of
National Socialism, first published in 1942. Neumann had finished
working on the book right before he joined the staff of OSS. In the
book that had not been submitted to the usual rigorous peer review
of the Institute, so Neumann rejected Horkheimers influential thesis
on bureaucracy Neumann argued, similarly to Hannah Arendts
thesis in her The Origin of Totalitarianism (which is indebted to
Neumanns work, although barely refers to it), that National Socialism
was a new, until then unknown political form, a monstrosity,
forewarned by Thomas Hobbes in his Behemoth, a work, not of
prophecy of course, but one on the English Civil War. Neumann notes

that the Nazi theoreticians and propagandists abandoned the notion of

totalitarianism after 1934, and he decided to rescue and reevaluate
the concept in his book. Neumanns Behemoth asserted, although in a
less dramatic way than Hannah Arendt's Origins, that discontinuity
played a decisive role in the development of the totalitarian regime,
and that it was a novelty in contemporary history I venture to
suggest that we are confronted with a form of society in which the
ruling groups control the population directly, without the mediation of
the rational though coercive apparatus hitherto known as the state.
(p. 470.)2
Public opinion research, and propaganda based on information distilled
from public opinion, played central role in the work of OSS. During
World War II migr scholars from Germany and Austria representing
several disciplines art history, psychoanalysis, film-studies - began
interpreting propaganda and were engaged in early public opinion
studies. The key figure of American public opinion research was Paul
Lazarsfeld, an Austrain refugee himself, who had been close to the
members of the Vienna circle (Carnap and Otto Neurath). Lazarsfeld
became the founder of the Bureau for Applied Social Research at
Columbia University, where, among others, including quite a few of the
European refugee scholars, Krackauer, and his friend Adorno worked,
and which would play the key role in the East European interview
projects, among them the 1956 Hungarian refugee interview project.
(Adorno was not formally connected to the Bureau. During his first
years in the US it was Lazarsfeld who helped him find a job at the
radio research operation in Newark, New Jersey.)

On the relation between Arendts' and Neumann's views on totalitarianism, see: Alfons Sllner,
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism in its original Context. In: European Journal of Political
Theory. vo. 3 No. 2., 2004. pp. 219-238

The scholars at the Research and Analysis Branch, with the help of
the so called Morale Section of the OSS, got engaged in studying and
interpreting public opinion. They monitored radio broadcasts,
especially radio programs from Germany but also from the Soviet
Union; they used prisoner-of-war interrogations and conducted
interviews. The program was headed by Hans Speier, who was
affiliated with the migr scholars at the New School.
These were the early days of professional public opinion research,
which started only in the 1930s in the U.S. (The Public Opinion
Quarterly, the professional forum of public opinion research was
launched in 1937 at Princeton University.) What the scholars at OSS
did in this regard, was quite similar to what their colleagues did for
example in London, where there was another important Central
European migr community, working in support of the British war
efforts.
The political scientists, art historians, and psychoanalysts of the
interwar years still made no distinction between propaganda (the
attempt to persuade) and public opinion (what people actually
thought). Despite the long tradition of the perception of the
importance of persuasion (rhetoric in antiquity, Gustave Le Bon's
famous study, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind from 1896, the
lessons learned from the time of World War I, propaganda pursued by
members of the avant-garde in the 1920s, etc.) it was especially the
political propaganda waged by the Soviet and Nazi regimes that
directed attention to issues of modern mass propaganda. (The Soviet
regime set up the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, while the
Nazis had their Ministry for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment.)
All the early theorists of totalitarianism became aware of the special
importance of modern propaganda both in the birth and the

consolidation of the modern undemocratic state. Franz Neumann,

Adorno, Krackauer, Hannah Arendt, Marcuse devoted long chapters to
the issue, which they considered as one of the defining features of the
totalitarian state. OSS considered the Soviet propaganda efforts not in
isolation but as part of broader programs aimed at psychological
warfare. In March 1944, for example, M. G. Natirov, working at OSS
prepared a memorandum for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Soviet
Psychological Warfare.
Ernst Kris, the well known art historian, before emigrating to England,
had been curator of applied arts at the Kunshistorisches Museum in
Vienna, and an analyst at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Kris,
together with some of his former students, including Ernst Gombrich,
the future director of the Warburg Institute in London, worked at the
monitoring and war propaganda section of the BBC. (Later on,
Gombrich wrote Myth and Reality in German War-Time Broadcasts,
published in London in 1970.) In 1939 Kris became a senior research
officer at the monitoring service of the BBC. In 1940 he moved to New
York to the New School of Social Research, where he became Hannah
Arendt's colleague, and together with the German migr scholar,
Hans Speier, he initiated a program to analyze Nazi broadcast.3
Kris put together a research team, supported by the Rockefeller
Foundations Research Project on Totalitarian Communication, and
published German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcast
during the War in 1944, influenced by Freud's and Abby Warburg's
ideas on memory. As part of the Rockefeller Foundation's project on
totalitarianism, Siegfried Kracauer worked in the archives of the
Museum of Modern Art, and wrote his famous essay, Propaganda and
the Nazi War Film that would later be included as a supplement in his
3

On Kris, see: Louis Rose's fascinating study, Interpreting Propaganda: Successors to Warburg
and Freud in Wartime. In: American Imago - Volume 60, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 122-130

important book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the

German Film (1947). In that chapter, analyzing Leni Riefenstahl's
The Triumph of the Will, Kracauer claimed: (F)rom the real life of the
people was built up a fake reality that was passed off as the genuine
one; but this bastard reality, instead of being an end in itself, merely
served as the set dressing for a film that was then to assume the
character of an authentic documentary. (301)
OSS ceased to exist as of October 1, 1945. Neuman left for Columbia,
Kirschheimer and Marcuse stayed on, and Lwenthal moved to the
research Department of Voice of America. Marcuse was at the State
Department until 1952 then went back to academia, first to Columbia,
then to Harvards Russian Institute, Brandeis, and finally to San Diego.
Quite a few former OSS employees, however, having no other
alternative, remained in public or quasi-public service, working for
different agencies, continuing their studies on the impact, and features
of totalitarian regimes, prominently among them the nature
propaganda. After the end of World War II the emphasis shifted from
Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, East and Central Europe.
With the advent of the Cold War, the interest of the successor
organizations of OSS and that of the remaining refugee intellectuals
moved: besides hard data on the state of the economy and society,
the military capabilities of the Communist countries, the analysts
became primarily interested in the techniques and effectiveness of
Soviet-type persuasion and propaganda, psychological factors, and
brainwashing. There was a marked shift towards uncovering the
psychological working and effects of the Soviet totalitarian rule, and in
the midst of Cold War phantasmagoria, interviews conducted with East
and Central European refugees were used for identifying the

techniques of Soviet psychological warfare. In the heightened

atmosphere of the late 1940s, early 1950s solid, academically
grounded research on propaganda and dubious attempts at finding the
secrets of brainwashing were not clearly indistinguishable anymore.
It was the trial of the Hungarian archbishop cardinal Jzsef
Mindszenty, which triggered obsessive interest in psychological
warfare, forced interrogation and brainwashing. As a secret CIA
document put it: The behavior of defendants at court trials in Russia
and her satellite countries, and the whole pattern of Soviet Trial
procedure in general, make it essential to investigate the use of drugs,
hypnotism, hypno-narco-analysis, electric and drug shock and possible
the use of ultrasonics The trials of Cardinal Mindszenty, the Jesuit
priests... furnish many indications of the Soviet use of drugs for
obtaining forced confessions in court procedure and probable extensive
use on war prisoners in the future.4
The first extensive refugee interviews were conducted in the hysterical
atmosphere of the early phase of the Cold War. Between June 1951
and March 1952 more than three hundred Polish, Czechoslovak and
Hungarian refugees were interviewed in German and Austrian refugee
camps by a cover organization called International Public Opinion
Research, Inc. (later known as International Research Associates), the
same organization, which conducted thousand and seventy interviews
with Hungarian refugees after 1956. The 1951-52 interviews were
analyzed by Siegfried Kracauer and Paul L. Berkman, on behalf of
Columbia Universitys Bureau of Applied Social Research. The work
was supported by the Ford Foundation, which also provided financial
support to the 1956 Hungarian Refugee interviews. Under the
conditions of the Cold War and the McCarthy hearings it was no
4

National Security Archives. John Marks Collection. Entry 261. Box 7, folder 5. (Defense Against
Soviet Medical Interrogation And Espionage Techniques)

wonder that Satellite Mentality, the published version of the qualitative

analysis had the subtitle Political Attitudes and Propaganda
Susceptibilities of Non-Communists in Hungary, Poland and
Czechoslovakia. The book was published in the fall of 1956, just a few
weeks before the outbreak of the Hungarian revolution. Henry L.
Roberts, director of the Russian Institute of Columbia, wrote the
foreword; in a few months time he would become the head of the
1956 Columbia Hungarian refugee project. As the foreword
acknowledged, the study was conceived by Leo Lwenthal, former
member of the Frankfurt School, a veteran of OSS, who after the end
of the war worked as Chief of the Evaluation Division of the
International Broadcasting Service of the State Department. Besides
Lwenthal, other former members of the R&A Branch of the OSS, such
as the Cornell sociologist, Alex Inkeles, provided expert advice for the
Satellite Mentality volume.
The interviews were conducted before Stalins death, before the
workers uprising in Berlin, but the book saw publication only in 1956
under somewhat changed conditions. Kracauer and Berkman address
this issue in a way that is especially interesting in the light of the 1956
Hungarian events. Under the impact of cold war conditions as they
obtained in 1951 practically all Polish, Czechoslovak and Hungarian
respondents in effect declare that active resistance is out of question.
But what if conditions change? Significantly, most interviewees
envision only one kind of crisis favorable to large-scale uprisings the
crucial period attendant on the outbreak of a new shooting war.They
just cannot imagine rebellion without the aid of the American war
machineAccording to a report by Foreign News Services Inc., on
interviews with 110 young refugees from Communist countries who
fled as late as 1953, these new arrivals resemble much the

respondents of 1951; like them, they stake their hopes on liberation

and insist that liberation will not come without war.5
Future contributors of the 1956 Hungarian refugee project published
important scholarly essays with immediate policy relevance on the
pages of the Public Opinion Quarterly in the early 1950s. Paul
Kecskemeti, one of the experts of the 1956 Columbia project, who
would publish his book The Unexpected Revolution: Social Forces in
the Hungarian Uprising (Stanford, 1961), based on the analysis of the
interviews, wrote Totalitarian Communications as a Means of Control:
A Note on the Sociology of Propaganda, back in 1950. Kecskemeti, a
former employee of the Office of War Information, later on a research
scientist at the Rand Corporation, compared the role of public
opinion and propaganda in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. On
the pages of the same journal Lwenthal and Joseph H. Klepper
published The Contributions of Opinion Research to the Evaluation of
Psychological Warfare (winter 1951-1951). In the winter of 1952 The
Public Opinion Quarterly devoted a special issue to the problems of
International communication Research. Leo Lwenthal wrote the
introduction, Paul Lazarsfeld, Joseph Klapper, Alex Inkeles were
among the contributors. Harold Lasswell devoted an essay to
Psychological Policy Research and Total Strategy, Richard C. Sheldon
and John Dutkowski asked the methodologically crucial question, Are
Soviet Satellite Refugee Interviews Projectable?, and Siegfried
Kracauer wrote an important piece on The Challenge of Qualitative
Content Analysis. Kracauer, on the basis of his experience while
working on the Satellite Mentality book, tried to make a virtue out of
necessity, and argued for the superiority of qualitative analysis of
limited and unrepresentative sample (which was the case with the
5

Satellite Mentality. New York, Praeger Publishers, 1956 p. 7.

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refugee interviews) as opposed to representative quantitative

methods. With the help of Kurt H. Wolff, the Institute experimented
with qualitative research, however, the Rockefeller Foundation that
had funded the experiment, decided not to renew Wolffs grant, as the
Foundation wanted real, solid, American-type quantitative research.6
After having published his Satellite Mentality, Kracauer went on
working for Columbia Universitys Hungarian Refugee Interview
project, supported by Lwenthal. It is remarkable that the former
members of the Frankfurt School became engaged not only in
theorizing about the nature of totalitarianism, but were involved in
producing those sources the interviews on which the theoretical
insights were based. While the critical social scientists were refining
the theory of totalitarianism, and the role of propaganda in its
working, based on comparable empirical data distilled in part from the
stories of the refugees, other analysts were still searching for the
secret of the truth serum in the interviews.
In August 1956 Harold G. Wolff and Lawrence E. Hinkle published a
paper in the American Medical Associations Archives of Neurology and
Psychiatry. The special report, entitled Communist Interrogation and
Indoctrination of Enemies of the States: Analysis of Methods Used by
the Communist State Police, was a declassified version of a secret
report which the authors had submitted to Allen Dulles. Wolff, an
expert in migraine, was president of the New York Neurological
Association, he later became president of the American Neurological
Association. Hinkle was a professor at Cornell Universitys Medical
College in New York City. Both of them played central roles in setting
up the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, perhaps the
most important academic cover organization for the Cold War mind6

Professor David Kettlers information,, based on his intimate knowledge of the activities of the

Institute.

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control programs. The study most probably even in its published

version could be considered as the intellectual conclusion, if not the
actual end, of research into brainwashing. The authors seemed to have
doubts about magical psychological weapons, comparable to the
effectiveness of nuclear arms in other military fields, allegedly
possessed either by the Soviets or the Chinese. They stated that the
Reds most probably did not make extensive and effective use of
hypnosis or any other surprising brainwashing technique. They argued
that the Soviets and the Chinese had to resort to old-fashioned,
traditional, although exceptionally brutal, psychological and police
investigation methods, to break the resistance of the suspect or the
enemy. The report, however, did not make any real difference; the
behavior modification programs and serious consideration of
brainwashing continued.
At the time of the defeat of the Hungarian revolution, experts working
directly or indirectly for clandestine agencies were still very much
attracted to the psychological working of the Soviet-type totalitarian
regime. As Philip Goldman, a former employee of the Central
Intelligence Agency formulated it in response to Senator Kennedys
question before the Select Committee on Intelligence, obviously, the
study of the Hungarian refugees who came to this country after the
Hungarian revolt was a very useful exercise to try to get information
about the personality characteristics of the Communists7
The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the cover
organization that played the central role in the behavior modification
experiments from the beginning of the 1950s, organized a seminar in
April 1957 to discuss the first lessons learned from the Hungarian
7

Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommitte On Health and
Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate Ninety-Fifth Congress,
first session, August 3, 1977. U.S. Governmnet Printing Office, Washington: 1977.

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refugee project. Dr Wolff and Dr. Hinkle, the senior experts of the
behavior modification program from Cornells Medical School, who took
an active part in investigating the Hungarian refugees, stated at the
meeting that they were interested in the Communist methods,
brainwashing and so forth in Americans that (sic) had been prisoners
of warWe have an interest in the impact of the Hungarian experience
the last decade, but more particularly the revolt of October, 1956
on the psyche and the physical condition of Hungarian society. Our
interest is in the individual, not in the system or in society as a
whole.... in comparisons, but only to the extent that if influences the
individual personality.
There were two conflicting approaches in relation to the interviews: on
the one hand, there was a clear sociological interest that aimed at
uncovering and understanding the working of the Communist system
by analyzing the societies concerned Kracauer argued for this in a
memorandum written for the Bureau of Applied social Research in April
1958: There was a need to define the total situation [that] involves
various areas; not only sociology proper and social psychology
(whereby, in view of the current bias in favor of 'psychology' the
emphasis should be put on the sociological rather than psychological
component of this discipline) but also economics, politics,
anthropology, history.8 Others, closely associated with the Society for
the Investigation of Human Ecology, the Cornell Medical School, or the
representative of the so called Psychological Research Associates from
Virginia, wanted to continue the psychological and para-psychological
explorations of the early Cold War era. As a document, written by a
certain colonel Monroe, also from the Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology stated: The primary interest should be 1. The effects
8

On the Relation of Analysis to the Situational Factors in Case Studies. (This was a discussion
paper written for the Columbia interview project.)

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of Communist indoctrination; 2. What do the various studies tell us on

Communist control techniques; 3. The sources and conditions of
loyalty; 4. Methodology in interviewing defectors. Despite the
disagreement, the two approaches did not remain clearly separate
from each other, as the example of one of the sidetracks of the
interview project illustrates.
In the face of security leaks, and growing concern over secret
programs without proper political supervision, after 1953 it became
more and more difficult for the intelligence agencies to continue the
brainwashing explorations, and experiment on unwitting U.S. citizens,
even on criminals serving prison sentences. But for the proponents of
the continuation of the clandestine activities, the arrival of large
numbers of refugee after the defeat of the 1956 revolution, none of
them U.S. citizens, promised the opportunity to continue the behavior
modification experiments.
A large group of the newly arrived emigrants settled in New Brunswick,
New Jersey, which has a traditional, large Hungarian community. It
has been, in a sense, one of the centers of the Hungarian community
in the U.S. since World War I. The central campus of Rutgers
University is in New Brunswick, the Psychology and Sociology
Departments of which had already had contacts with behavior
modification program before 1956. Under the cover of the Human
Ecology Society, Richard Stephenson and Jay Schulman from Rutgers
received a grant to study a group of newly arrived Hungarian refugees.
According to the research proposal, written as a private
correspondence, the aim was of course, to throw as much light as
possible on the sociology of the Communist system in the throes of the
revolution. Only fragmentary information is available on the social
processes through which a totalitarian government secures

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cooperation or fails to secure it. This means for example that our U.S.
psychological warfare program in Iron Curtain countries is greatly
hindered And now Hungary has revolted and the fleeing Hungarians
are in our midst. This seems an ideal moment to study a totalitarian
system in disruption.9
The texts of the seminars make it clear there was a deep and
irresolvable tension between the two groups, the representatives of
the sociological and the psychological approaches. The fundamental
disagreement has not disappeared in the course of the seminars and
collective discussions; both sides remained dissatisfied and
disappointed with the huge, and largely unmanageable material.
Despite the enormous wealth of information, no magic formula was
found. This might be one of the reasons why this historical and
sociological goldmine remained largely forgotten and unexplored for
very long decades to come. There has not been any serious efforts up
to this day to make scholarly use, to analyze the tens of thousand
pages of the interviews.

National Security Archive. John Marks Collection. Entry 261. Box 3, folder 4.(1 February 1957)

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